


Accidental Gift

by AlchemyAlice



Category: Supernatural
Genre: Action/Adventure, M/M, Post-Apocalypse
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-05-10
Updated: 2012-05-10
Packaged: 2017-11-05 03:12:17
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 14,400
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/401823
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/AlchemyAlice/pseuds/AlchemyAlice
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>The problem with angel swords was that humans knew fuck-all about them. Worse, the angels were no better. Meanwhile, some post-apocalyptic cracks in the fabric of reality needed mending.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

  * For [nightrider101](https://archiveofourown.org/users/nightrider101/gifts).



> This is a long overdue gift for nightrider101. Also, I am ignorant of nearly everything in the show post-Apocalypse, so this is thoroughly AU.

The thing about the swords that all of the angels carried around with them was that humans knew fuck-all about them. There was nothing written about them (other than the stuff on Michael’s flaming one, and apparently that wasn’t even _real_ , it was just a metaphorical manifestation of Dean’s soulless body which, well, fuck) and all of the angels, including Cas, were weirdly tight-lipped about them.

“They are extensions of God’s will. A testament of trust in his servants’ obedience,” Cas had said briefly, when Sam had asked about them.

“How come you still have one, then?” Dean had asked, and Castiel had glared at him.

“A better question, perhaps, would be why Lucifer still does,” he’d growled, and left in a huff of air and feathers.

“Nice,” Sam had said, and Dean had been forced to throw a pillow at him.

So all they really knew was that angel swords were hot shit and killed other angels. These were useful things to know, obviously, but as was the case for everything that appeared unannounced in the Winchesters’ lives, it all turned out to be a lot more complicated than that.

They didn’t find this out until they were cleaning up after the apocalypse, and were feeling like maybe, just maybe, things were about to get better.

Which just about figured, in Dean’s book.

***

It was pretty clear from the get-go that Castiel hadn’t meant to give it to him. But Dean really didn’t see what the big deal was, at least at the time. Between the dozen-odd rebel angels they were up against and the fact that Cas had picked up a spare blade along the way, it came down to Dean needing an anti-angel sword and Cas having one available.

Dean didn’t know the first thing about sword-wielding, but the threat of dying in some sort of creative and nasty way was enough to encourage fast learning. There might have been some flailing involved, but he managed to only stab things that weren’t himself, and three fairly terrifying minutes and one hastily-scrawled banishing sigil later he, Sam, and Cas were the only ones left standing.

“So that was close,” Sam said, wrinkling his nose.

Dean flicked blood off of the sword and finished the thought. “Too fucking close for comfort, yeah. Here, Cas, thanks for the--” He stopped abruptly. “Dude! What the hell?”

Castiel looked at him. “Is there something wrong, Dean?”

“Uh, yeah. Want me to get a fire extinguisher or something?”

He was subjected to the frustration-inducing cocked head. “For what purpose?”

“What _purpose_? You’re on fire, Cas!” Dean exploded.

“Dean?” Sam said, and oh, that wasn’t good. The incredulous patronising voice was never good. “What are you talking about?”

Cautiously, Dean stepped towards Cas, who continued to look at him, apparently unfazed.

And okay, so _on fire_ wasn’t entirely accurate. Cas wasn’t just flaring up in the usual bonfire-y ways; the flames were coming from behind him, and followed specific controlled lines and curves, fading to ice blue at the peaks and contours and--

“Holy shit,” he breathed. “Cas, I think I can see your wings.”

Castiel looked abruptly concerned. “That’s impossible.”

“Yeah, well, either you’re on fire or I can see your wings,” Dean replied. He sidled closer like he was approaching a wild animal, and not Cas, nerdy angel of the Lord. Slowly, he raised a hand towards the swirl of flame just above Castiel’s shoulder. It seemed to pull just slightly towards his fingers, like the electricity in those plasma balls in science museums. Tendrils of the stuff flickered towards him, but he only felt it as a vague coolness, like water evaporating against his skin.

Castiel watched him in consternation, and then his eyes fell to the sword still in Dean’s opposite hand. He frowned. “I gave you my sword,” he stated slowly.

Dean tore his eyes away from the arcing inferno at Castiel’s back to raise an eyebrow. “Well, yeah dude, that’s what I was saying before,” he said. “You want it back? ‘Cause I think we’re done here.”

“No, I gave you _my_ sword,” Castiel said again, and this time there’s something tight about his voice, something Dean would call trepidation if it was anyone else. “I meant to give you one that had belonged to one of my fallen brethren. But I gave you mine instead.”

Dean shrugged. “Easy mistake. They’re pretty standard issue.”

“On the contrary,” Castiel growled. “They are very different. They are marked by us the moment we take them up for the first time.”

Dean leaned back. “Okay,” he said slowly. “So does that mean that you don’t want it back?”

Castiel snatched it out of his hands. 

“…Dude. Manners.”

The angel was studying the sword like Dean had contaminated it. Dean tried not to be too offended.

Sam cleared his throat. “Can we go now, before cops show up wanting to know why we’re covered in blood and standing in the middle of a bunch of corpses?”

“Yeah, that’d be good,” Dean replied. He jerked his head at Castiel. “You comin’?”

Castiel nodded slowly, still running his hands along the flat of the blade. Then in a smooth gesture he slipped it up his sleeve, and it seemed to disappear altogether. For all Dean knew, it actually had. The angel shrugged minutely, as if to readjust the hang of his coat, but it translated into an arching flex in his wings that Dean instinctively dodged.

Castiel noticed the reaction and grimaced; Sam was looking at them both like they were crazy.

Yeah, this was going to be interesting.

***

Castiel sat in the back of the car like he always did. It seemed he preferred to keep under the traveling radar while keeping company with the Winchesters nowadays, which was understandable, really. Heaven was a veritable circus, from what Dean had gleaned from Castiel’s mutterings, and playing sheriff allowed for minimal vacation days and maintaining a high threshold of paranoia about competing angelic factions at all times.

So Cas didn’t use angel air so much when he came to visit, and only visited when he was sure he wasn’t being tailed. It wasn’t that often, which was sort of upsetting, but Dean wasn’t admitting that to anyone. It was only sensible anyway—after Sam had come back from his weird-ass sojourn of ‘finding himself’ post-Lucifer and Dean had broken it off with Lisa, they’d both started seeing lines of strain appearing like cracks between Heaven and Earth. Flashes of light coming from faults in the concrete of old abandoned buildings, ashen outlines of wings on the ground, human shells long ago discarded. Shit was going down upstairs, and Cas was stuck right in the middle of it. He didn’t talk about it much unless it threatened human civilisation, but Dean could tell it was taking its toll. So he wasn’t about to begrudge the angel’s reticence, or his long absences.

He and Sam got on with life, cleaning up the mess. It did seem, no matter how many times they got offed or possessed or torn apart, that this was their lot.

It was nice, though, when Cas deemed it safe to come down for a while. Comforting, in its way, just because it meant that Dean still had a friend who he trusted to fight the good fight.

But again, Dean was admitting that to no one.

Castiel was sitting in the car like he didn’t have wings at all, and the wings just sort of dissipated into the leather of the Impala’s backseat. It was unsettling at best. Dean kept looking at it in the rearview mirror.

“Dean. Watch the road,” Sam said.

“Yeah, yeah.”

They made it back to the motel and headed inside. Dean looked back over his shoulder as Castiel got out of the car, plumes of fire curving out behind him, incandescent and yet shedding no light on his surrounds. “You coming in?” he asked.

Castiel considered. “For a while.” He paused, looking at Dean for a moment. “You can still see them?”

Dean nodded.

“I think I would like to see if you continue to do so.”

Dean couldn’t tell whether it was curiosity colouring Castiel’s voice, or annoyance, or even worry. Maybe all three. “All right,” he said, shrugging. “Come on in, then.”

***

(Months before, when Sam had first come back, Dean had hugged him, gotten him blitzed on JD (because while Sam might be a fucking giant, Dean was the one with a liver of steel) and promptly put him to bed with the pronouncement, “Okay, sappy girly reunion over, Sasquatch.”

Then he’d gone deep into the woods outside the motel they were staying at, and screamed invectives until he had felt like he would never be able to take another breath or say another word ever again.

It should have been cathartic, but it hadn’t been, not at all.

Except that, between one half-sobbing breath and the next, Cas had appeared at his side.

“I thought you would be pleased,” he’d said, cocking his head.

Dean had stared at him for a long moment, absorbing the way the woods seemed strangely warmer now, and the way his heart rate was beginning to slow. Castiel had remained still, waiting for Dean to react.

“Pleased really isn’t the right word,” Dean had croaked eventually, his voice shot all to hell. “I’m glad he’s back. I’m fucking relieved, maybe even happy. But he’s been alive for _three fucking months._ Three months, and I hadn’t heard a thing from him. He doesn’t… _fuck._ ”

“He doesn’t do family the way you do,” Castiel had said, weirdly colloquial.

“I know it too, it’s not like I’m surprised, and it’s not like he’s doing it wrong,” Dean had replied, exhaling, and feeling oddly relieved that Cas could distill his confusion and rage into something so simple and true. Too often the angel was awful at finding the right thing to say, but sometimes he just _got_ it, and Dean had found himself stupidly grateful that this one of those times. “It just always hurts, every time. You’d think I’d have developed some sort of resistance to it by now.”

“Some things we cannot build a resistance to, no matter how hard we try,” Castiel had murmured.

Dean had looked at him sharply at that. Cas had sounded like he was speaking from experience, though Dean couldn’t think of anything that could have given him that sort of weary understanding. Maybe faith. He figured that would be a habit an angel would find very hard to break indeed, even with a full-on Godless apocalypse under their collective belts.

He was suddenly, overwhelmingly tired. “I’ve gotta get back to the room,” he had said. Then he’d added, “Do you…do you want to come in for a drink?”

“I’m afraid I can’t,” Cas had said, and disappeared between one breath and the next.

And then Dean had been left wondering why he’d bothered to come down at all.)

***

The motel was a monstrosity, worse than usual because someone in the seventies thought it would be a great idea to have a rodeo-themed motel in the middle of Washington State. Yeah, Dean didn’t get it either.

The orange carpet smelled of damp and the pictures of bucking broncos on the walls looked like they’d been bought at a flea market. Sam threw his duffle onto his bed and headed straight for the bathroom. Dean collapsed onto the opposite bed without bothering to take off his boots. He eyed Castiel, who remained standing like some sort of awkward statue by the door. “Sit down, Cas, stay a while.”

Castiel considered him, and then said eventually, “Very well.”

It was still weird to see him so fully angelic again. The stiffness was back in his limbs, and he moved like he was made of tungsten just under the skin. He sat in a measured fashion, settling at the edge of the spindly chair by the window. His wings shifted, sparks popping against the arms of the chair before the flames just slid through. Dean’s pretty sure he wouldn’t ever be not fascinated by how they seemed to be both _there_ and _not there_.

“Wanna tell me what’s got your panties in such a twist over someone else touching your sword?” He made a face. “Ugh, that sounded sketchy.”

“I see nothing related to drawing in what you said,” Castiel replied, and then just stopped, looking away.

“Seriously? We’re not going to talk about this?”

“Our weapons are a sensitive subject,” he said tightly.

Dean snorted. “I cannot believe how phallic this conversation is.”

“There is nothing sexual about it,” Castiel snapped. “God’s weapons are sacred articles, safeguarded by their wielders, to be handled by them alone. In all of creation I have never known a sword of one angel to be handled by another unless that original angel is either dead or about to be killed upon his own weapon. And to give up one’s sword willingly…it’s never been done. It is blasphemy.”

“Well, I hate to say it, Cas, but blasphemy’s hardly been new to you lately. Well, not really lately, but before...you know,” Dean made vague gestures with his hands that indicated everything from apocalyptic happenings to re-angelification.

“This is very different,” Castiel said, unmoved. He looked away. “This isn’t just blasphemy of God, this is blasphemy of…of myself. Not even the fallen entrust their swords to one another.”

Dean frowned, and sat up. “So, what’s gonna happen to you, then?”

Castiel flicked a glance at him, but it only lasted a second. “I don’t know, Dean. But considering you’re the one able to see even a fraction of my true form, I think the question you ought to be asking is, what’s going to happen to you?”

***

(The night before he’d left, Lisa had cornered him in the kitchen. “I know what you’re going to do tomorrow,” she said, crossing her arms protectively.

“And what’s that?” he’d asked, because as far as he knew he’d given her no clues, no warning at all.

“You’re leaving. You have some unfinished business,” she’d said.

He had been kind of surprised. “I guess I am leaving,” he’d admitted, “But as far as I know, my score is settled. Or as settled as it can be.”

“Uh huh,” she’d said, dry as bone, “You keep telling yourself that.”

He’d shaken his head as he drove, not knowing what to make of her.

Ten hours later, he nearly skidded into a hole in the world that tore right across a stretch of empty highway in North Dakota, and then it was just like old times, calling Bobby on his cell and asking what the fuck was going on.

He’d given a brief thought to how maybe Lisa was psychic or something, but dismissed it immediately after. You didn’t need to be psychic to know how fucked up Dean was, or how even more fucked up the world was.)

***

It didn’t go away.

Dean was forced to order Castiel away, because having those wings in the room was like having a man-sized nightlight right there beside the beds.

“I may not be able to return for some time if I leave now,” Castiel said, with something like dread in his tone. Dean winced.

“You could go next door?” he suggested. “You don’t have to go just yet.”

“If there are things you need to take care of, it’s cool,” Sam mumbled, already half-asleep and not at all bothered by the radiant glow of constantly shifting feather-like flames rising and falling in time with Castiel’s breathing. Dean glared at his supine form.

“Then I will go,” Castiel said, after a pause.

“You don’t have to,” Dean said, unsure of why he was being so insistent, but Cas really looked as though he didn’t want to go back to being sheriff just yet, and he supposed he felt kind of bad about that. “If you have the time, you can spend it with us. Just, you’re really bright right now—”

“No, I will go,” Castiel said, more firmly. “I will see you as soon as I can get away again.”

And suddenly his wings were expanding in vast plumes, reaching back and sparking, and as they beat against space the usual flutter of wingbeats manifested in a bursting loop of fire.

It whooshed against the motel room wall, and then was gone, like it and all of the air had been sucked out of the room at once.

“Flashy,” Dean commented, a little awestruck despite himself.

“Bhuh?” Sam mumbled.

“Go to sleep, Sam.”

***

Nothing really happened immediately after the sword incident, enough for Dean to almost forget about how he apparently had some kind of mojo’d eyesight from handling Castiel’s sword. It helped that that very sentence sounded wildly inappropriate even in his own head, and thus was banished to the furthermost parts of his mind.

Sam only mentioned it once more, because of course his giant brain was still mulling over it. “You know, it’s weird,” he said, while they were on the road.

Dean looked at him. “You’re going to have to be a lot more specific than that, dude,” he said.

Sam shrugged. “Cas is usually so…not exactly _together_ , but…deliberate, you know? Like, he decides to do something, so he does it. No mistakes, no snap decisions. Hell, he doesn’t even flinch at archangels anymore.”

“He’s made mistakes,” Dean pointed out. “Some pretty damn big ones, if I recall.”

“Yeah, but even those…they were mistakes of judgement, not heat-of-the-moment stuff. He’s never just, slipped up.”

Dean sighed. “Where are you going with this?”

Sam tilted his head back and forth. “I dunno. It seems weird that he should have given you his sword by accident. He had two on him, but according to him he can tell them apart really easily, because who they belong to is important and significant or whatever. I just…it just seems weird that he’d make that kind of mistake.”

“So, what, you think he did it on purpose?”

“Maybe?”

Dean thought about it. “He seemed pretty upset after, for that to have been deliberate.”

Sam deflated. “Yeah. I guess.”

The subject was dropped.

They ganked a demon that had come through a new hellmouth-y crack in Montana, and then went after a pack of werewolves in northern Texas, and managed to come out of it with only one set of cracked ribs between them, which was a pretty damn good outcome, considering.

Sam moaned about it and popped aspirin like candy, but it was mostly for show—he even agreed to come out to the bar with Dean and managed to snag himself a hot little blonde bartender at the end of the night.

It was all kind of ridiculously normal, even though Dean was kind of miffed about not spotting the bartender first. Mostly he was just glad that Sam was starting to act like himself again, after all of the angst at the end of the world. It was weird and difficult moving on from that, not to mention incredibly disturbing at times, what with the holes that kept popping up in the world’s fabric, but did feel possible, this time around.

Dean kinda liked that. So he kept knocking beers back, and just clapped a hand on Sam’s shoulder in congratulations when he’d raised his eyebrows in indication that he wouldn’t be going back to the motel room tonight.

Yeah, things were slowly going back to normal. Or as normal as stuff was, for Winchesters.

Dean slept in the motel room alone. 

He had a vague dream about stars, roiling nebulae in the distance, and cold fresh air, but he didn’t remember it after it was done.

***

(The thing about angel swords, that not even _angels_ knew, was that they didn’t actually exist.

Well. Mostly.

The only guy who did know didn’t exactly stick around to explain it. And Chuck? Wasn’t saying _nothing_.)

***

Sam came back around four in the morning, and Dean was feeling magnanimous enough to let him sleep in, so despite their plan to set out for New Mexico early in the morning, they didn’t end up leaving until around noon.

Sam paid back the gesture by getting breakfast, leaving Dean to pack.

The sun was out in full force, and Dean felt uncharacteristically cold.

He pulled on an extra flannel as they finally pulled out, breakfast burritos in hand.

“What’s on the menu, Sammy?” he said through a mouthful of egg, merging onto the highway.

“Shifter maybe, or shifter demons. We’ll have to see about the sulfur.”

“Awesome,” he said dryly. He cranked up the heat.

Sam looked at him incredulously. “It’s August,” he said.

“It’s a fucking cold August.”

“It’s eighty-two degrees.”

“Lies.”

Sam went through a series of increasingly hysterically bitchy expressions, and then tapped at his iPod Touch in sharp little gestures. He shoved the screen in Dean’s face.

“Eighty. Two. Degrees.”

“Get that thing out of my face.”

“You’re seriously cold?”

“Just a little chilly. Suck it up, bitch, or crack a window.”

“Fine!”

“Fine.”

Dean pulled onto the highway, and they didn’t talk anymore. After fifteen minutes, Sam stripped down to his t-shirt.

Dean shifted his shoulders in his three layers of flannel. “It’s really not that cold out?” he asked eventually.

“It’s a fucking sauna in here, Dean,” Sam snapped.

Dean sighed. “Shit.”

***

Several planes of existence away, Castiel scowled, and dusted the iridescent damp of otherworldly snow off his shoulders.

***

“You’re freezing? How about you have a fucking fever and you’re going through the chills phase. Use your brain, boy,” Bobby suggested, sounding even crankier over the phone than he did in person.

“I feel fine, I don’t have a fever,” Dean said. “I’m just cold.”

“Then put on a sweater and stop bothering me.”

The line went dead.

“So?” Sam raised an eyebrow inquiringly.

“Shut up. And gimme that sweatshirt in the back.”

***

The whole cracks-in-the-space-time-continuum thing had been iffy from the beginning. As soon as Dean had run into that first one on the highway heading away from Lisa’s, Bobby had called everyone in his network, and received a unanimous reply: They didn’t know what the fuck was going on, but if you ganked enough demons around the problem area, they eventually stopped coming and started looking for other doorways.

It was...a terrible solution. But it was the only one they got.

Cas had been no help at all. He’d come down several weeks after the first incident, had cocked his head in that sober, irritated fashion, and said, “I’ll look into it,” before disappearing.

But he hadn’t updated them since, despite appearing several times more. Dean had resigned himself to the possibility that there was nothing to look _for_. After all, not a single thing in the world or off it had actually been prepared to live through the Apocalypse. All bets were off.

“This sucks,” Sam observed once, a few more weeks after, when they’d finished clearing out a mess of demons from the Appalachians.  

“Tell me about it,” Dean had agreed.

But they had gotten on with it, and did their job. It was something close to normal. 

Which was obviously why it hadn’t lasted long.

***

By the time they reached New Mexico, Dean was noticeably shivering.

Sam kept shooting him concerned glances, which he only found irritating, since it was Sam’s turn to drive.

“Dude. Eyes on the road.”

“What kind of cold is it? Like, weak and shaky kind of cold, or—”

“I don’t have a fucking fever, Sam. It just feels like it’s fucking cold out.”

“Okay, okay. Do you think it was that demon in Fort Benton? She could have sent something your way.”

“Her parting shot was to make me cold three weeks after the fact? That’d be pretty lame, and she didn’t seem that low on the food chain. Third circle, at least.”

Sam winced. It still bothered him that Dean knew so much about demon hierarchies nowadays, despite having had a taste of it himself. His Hell experience had been far more confined, with a lot more hanging around in darkness with a very angry fallen archangel, though, while Dean had…well.

In any case, being in the unwilling employ of demons for a while left a mark, and Dean was done apologising for it.

“Well, do you have any better theories? Because I got nothing.”

Dean just shook his head and hunched his shoulders against a non-existent chill.

The Impala ate up the miles.

“We could call Cas,” Sam suggested finally.

Dean tried not to jump on it too visibly. “Might be a good idea.” He reached for his phone.

***

Cas didn’t pick up. Such were the hazards of satellites that didn’t get a signal across certain planes of existence.

“Hey, Cas? It’s me. Listen, something weird’s going on with me, so if you get a chance, call me back and I’ll let you know where we are. Um. Yeah. Catch you later.”

***

(If Dean really cared to remember (and he didn’t), he would be able to recall another time when he had seen Castiel’s wings.

To do so, however, would be remember all of the shit that came along with that first item, all blood and fire and brimstone, and that was the stuff that already lingered behind his eyes whenever he closed them anyway; he had no desire to look any deeper into that cold burning chaos.

If he did, however, he would notice that even then, ragged and exhausted, the wings had been all he had ever seen of hope in forty years, and that they had burned and burned and burned, with nothing but will and _justice_ holding them together as they’d borne him up and away.)

***

Dean got colder. Castiel didn’t show, and three days past in which he went from layered henleys and flannel to sweatshirts and fingerless gloves and his heaviest jackets. They went up to Montana to take out a circle of kidnapping wood sprites, and he actually thought he was going to get frostbite.

Sam went to a local ski shop and bought him hand warmers. “The guy at the counter looked at me like I was actually insane,” he complained, but it came out sounding more worried than annoyed.

Dean clamped his jaw tight shut, and shoved his hands (with fingerless gloves and the hand warmers clutched in his palms) into his jacket pockets. He moved stiffly, his joints protesting the work. He’d taken his temperature while Sam was out, and it had been a cool 98.6 degrees. It didn’t make any fucking sense.

This didn’t stop him from banishing the wood sprites with extreme malice. But he’d almost blown their cover with the chattering of his teeth, and by the end of the night Sam was practically force-feeding him broth just to see if it would give him some temporary relief. It did, but only for the amount of time it took for Dean to actually consume it.

“This is getting fucking ridiculous,” he complained, huddled in the blankets from the motel beds.

Sam just shook his head, and looked worried. “We’re only taking jobs in the south until we get this fixed,” he said.

Dean didn’t argue. His muscles were shaky and sore from shivering, and it didn’t seem to be abating at all.

The next day, they headed towards Arizona.

***

(Had they left the motel four hours later, they would have seen the convenience store next door vanish into a fissure in time and space, blackness yawning around its absence before spitting out something bright and sharp in its place.

The bright sharp thing adjusted the fit of its coat, produced a grim little smile, and started to walk.)

***

Castiel came back finally, inconveniently, two days later on a highway in bumfuck-nowhere Nevada.

He appeared without warning, and Sam took one look at him in the rear view mirror and swerved abruptly over onto the shoulder of the highway.

“We have a problem,” Castiel growled.

“Jesus, Cas, are you okay?” Sam said, slamming on the brakes.

“No,” Castiel replied flatly, swaying dangerously as the Impala came to a standstill. “I am not okay.”

Dean shifted awkwardly around to look at him through the mess of sweatshirts and blankets in which he was nowadays perpetually cocooned, and his eyes widened. “Christ,” he said. “The fuck happened to you, dude?”

“More relevant is what hasn’t,” Cas replied, his voice tight.

Dean guessed that Cas hadn’t actually gotten his phone message.

The angel was a rough sight. He was soaked with what looked like the remnants of melting snow, translucent clumps of it in his hair and on his shoulders. There was a steady trickle of blood down from his hairline to his jaw, and bruising around his throat from what must have been a truly vicious chokehold. The trench coat was ripped in multiple places along the seams and elsewhere, bloodstains streaking the lapels and seeping into the frayed edges, and the usual blue tie was entirely gone.

Most importantly, however, was that Dean could still see the wings, and that even _they_ looked bad. They were dimmed, great swathes of them sparking more than being actively aflame. It made him look strangely more vulnerable than the rest of the mess combined.

Dean opened his mouth to ask for clarification, but then abruptly shut it again. Frowning, he shrugged one blanket off of his shoulders.

Sam leapt in instead. “Where have you been? We called you before.”

“I’ve been…out of this dimension. There was an altercation that didn’t go my way, and I had to get somewhere difficult to reach. Unfortunately,” Castiel grimaced, like his current state was merely vexing rather than life-threatening, “It was a taxing transition between zones.”

“No cell reception in other dimensions, got it,” Sam muttered.

“Altercation?” Dean asked. He had shrugged off a second blanket and kicked it to the floor of the car.

“Angels of Raphael’s thinking. I was severely outnumbered.”

“You’ve been outnumbered before.”

“Yes. Which brings me to my reason for returning to you.” Castiel regarded Dean with an expression Dean had some trouble deciphering—a mix of irritation, worry, and something else entirely that could have been anything from anxiety to unholy wrath. It was difficult, because Castiel had many degrees of wrath in him, and Dean was unwilling to limit him to the ones Dean himself recognised.

Castiel took a breath and the exhaled it almost on a growl. “My sword is unable to kill angels at this time.”

“Your sword’s broken?” Sam said blankly.

“Dude,” Dean said automatically, “You can’t just _say_ that to a guy.”

“I don’t see why not; it’s an accurate description,” Castiel replied.

Dean was pretty sure that if he wasn’t so concerned he would have given himself a mini-ulcer trying not to laugh at that. As it was, though, he was slowly peeling layers of warm clothing away from himself, because for the first time in what seemed like years, he was _warm_.

A horrible sort of realization took hold of him. “Cas,” he said, looking pointedly at the melting snow on the angel’s shoulders, “Have you been somewhere particularly cold lately?”

Castiel looked at him. “Between worlds, there is only a frozen void. I hid there during the worst of my recovery.”

“You call this ‘recovered’?” Sam muttered.

“Cas,” Dean asked flatly. “Were you cold?”

The angel held his gaze. “I don’t feel temperature the way you do,” he answered.

Sam looked between them and put it together. “Dean. You think…?”

“Yeah.”

“But that’s…”

“Yeah.”

Castiel seemed to finally get it. “You have been cold, Dean?” he asked in consternation.

“That would be a fuckin’ understatement, dude,” Dean said, now down to his t-shirt. “You may not feel cold, but I definitely, _definitely_ do.”

“And you think that this is connected to where I have been?”

“I dunno, man, when did you go out there?”

Castiel thought, eyebrows scrunching together. “In your world, approximately two and a half weeks ago,” he said finally.

Dean looked at Sam. “Two and a half weeks. We took care of that werewolf den around then.”

“And you started freezing just after that,” Sam finished. He pursed his lips.

Dean shrugged. “Simplest explanation. You give me your sword and freak out about it. Three days later, we’re been driving around the desert, you’re covered in snow, and I’m the one who ends up hypothermic. Also, I can still see your wings. It’s Occam’s Razor or some shit.”

Sam threw him a look, which Dean challengingly returned because whatever, he might not be Stanford material, but he did _read._

“Then nothing about this situation is simple,” Castiel grimaced. “If you are experiencing my environment over your own, then whatever connection that is enabling you to see my wings is more profound than alterations to your mental faculties.”

“It messed up my _mind_?”

“If it hadn’t, your eyes and brain would have melted out of your head.”

“Oh. Right.”

“We should test this, at least,” Sam interjected. “Just to be sure. Cas, maybe you could go somewhere cold again? Just for a second,” he added hastily, at Dean’s affronted look. “Just to see if it has the same effect.”

“It would probably be prudent for me to leave a trail elsewhere anyway,” Cas said darkly, and in a huge swoop of wings that had Dean instinctively jolting out of his seat, was gone.

“You really can still see them, huh?” Sam said at Dean’s crouched form in the footwell.

Dean looked back at him balefully. “Yes, Sam. I can.”

“What’re they like?”

“Same as always. Big and fiery and wing-shaped. Though they weren’t looking too good this time. Got some dark spots scattered in there. Angel assholes must have done a real number on him.”

Sam gave him a significant look, which he stalwartly ignored. Cas was Dean’s friend—Dean was allowed to sound concerned for his well being.

It only took a few minutes before he could feel the cold creeping back in; he hunched down and grabbed one of the discarded blankets and pulled out his phone.

“Okay, you can come back now, I’m freezing again.”

Cas reappeared in the back seat, looking winded. Sam raised an eyebrow. “Where—”

“Antarctica,” Castiel answered, and then after an irritated pause. “I perhaps should have aimed for somewhere less remote.”

Dean sighed and shrugged off the blanket again. He frowned when he turned to look at him, though. “Dude, those really do not look good.”

Castiel followed his gaze and reluctantly nodded. The wings looked even weaker now, dark spots creeping like ash between the licks of flame and electrical pulses, sputtering in fits and starts. “It takes a great deal of effort to keep oneself in the transitional dimensions,” he said. “I’ve been…run ragged, I suppose you’d say.”

“And that was for your recovery period? Dude.”

“There are a limited number of places for me to go that are truly safe at all times,” Castiel replied.

Dean pursed his lips. “Yeah, I get that.”

“Maybe we should stop somewhere?” Sam suggested after a second. “So we can try and figure this out.”

Castiel nodded.

Dean said, “All right, but gimme the keys. I’m not shivering like an idiot any more, so I’m driving.”

***

Seeing as they didn’t actually need to go to warmer climes now that Castiel had come back from the frozen void of inter-dimensional travel, the Winchesters stopped off on the border of Nevada where a one-horse town was a generous description for the smattering of run-down shops and single motel. They went through the usual rhythm of checking in and bringing their stuff inside, while Castiel stayed behind in the car, looking worn and beaten down and slightly damp from melting snow. Dean felt kind of irrationally guilty about that, given that he was feeling _great_ since he was no longer in fear of psychosomatic hypothermia. So when he ushered the angel into the motel room it was with a hand on his shoulder, steering him and his massive scary wings through the door.

Sam was already settled with a stack of books on either side of him on the bed, still managing after all these years to look like a dorky college student in his dorm more than anything else. “So. I don’t suppose you know anything new about angel swords you’d care to tell us, Cas?” he said.

Castiel exhaled. “I don’t…I only know what we were told. At the beginning.”

“Of what? Time? The universe?”

“Something like that.”

“Damn.”

“Who told you then? You said you’ve never met God,” Dean said.

“And I haven’t,” Castiel agreed. “Michael was the first of us, and he along with the other archangels taught us.”

Dean waited. Castiel met his gaze, and shifted, wings coming in protectively around his shoulders. Dean looked worriedly at the dark patches still pervading at the crests of them, and in the undersides of the flames that spread and shifted in the place of flight feathers. They hadn’t improved much in the hours they’d been driving. “Cas?” he prompted.

“I’ve already told you most of what I know,” the angel said. “Our weapons are born with us. It has been said that angels are but two things—our wings, which are our Father’s grace, and our swords, which are his justice. We are nothing without both of them.”

“What happened to you being as big as the Chrysler Building, then?” Sam said in consternation.

“That is the size of my true form when unconstrained, yes. My wings and my sword, abstracted into pure energy.” Castiel drew his sword from his sleeve and considered it. “This is condensed into non-abstraction, just as I am condensed to fit into Jimmy’s body. I couldn’t release my sword into its abstracted form on this plane of existence without taking out everything remotely unholy in a ten mile radius.”

Dean winced. “Damn.”

“I don’t understand why my giving it to you to defend yourself should have such consequences,” Castiel said, looking at Dean intently, his voice low with frustration, “Only that I am not surprised that _something_ happened, for the grievousness of my crime.”

“Well, can we logic it out, though?” Sam said, looking accusingly at the pile of books that he’d brought in, but which they’d already looked through and found devoid of useful information. “I mean, okay, so you your sword is symbolic of, or the embodiment of justice, right?”

Castiel gave a reluctant noise of assent, which conveyed in Dean’s mind that Sam was only accurate enough for the purposes of this conversation, nothing more. Sam seemed to pick up on it too, because he put on his determined face and continued, “So you effectively gave Dean your justice or whatever. But then he gave it back. And apparently that’s enough to leave Dean with some special abilities.”

“You know what’d be interesting,” Dean interrupted, musing, “Is if I can see every angel’s wings, or just yours, Cas.”

Castiel narrowed his eyes at him. “Why would that be interesting, Dean?”

Dean shrugged. “I guess it’d tell us whether this is general sort of deal or a personal one.”

He hadn’t really meant it to be a suggestive comment, but Cas seemed to take it like one. His wings hunched in even further, the dark parts flaring weakly with bursts of embers and electrical currents, and…was that a _flush?_ Holy shit, he’d embarrassed an angel. He hadn’t even done it on purpose this time.

He was going to Hell. Again.

Sam was giving him this exasperated, ‘you’ve broken him, you get to fix him’ look, so he shrugged again and said, “Or something, I’m just stabbing in the dark, man.”

Cas’s wings came down slightly. Good. It was interesting, really, how expressive Cas was with them—he’d always seemed so remote and still before, but the wings were always in motion, always telling something about what the angel was really feeling. Dean was kind of fascinated, if he was honest with himself. It gave something for him to hold onto, at least, when so often he felt entirely flummoxed by the complete otherness of Cas, especially now that he was back to full-on angel.

“I suppose,” Cas allowed. “But surely it is more important for us to sever this connection, or at least dull it. I have to travel to remote and often non-physical locations to continue my work in Heaven, and I can’t do that if I know that I may be damaging you in the process. What if I had gone to ground in the Pacific Ocean?”

Dean shuddered. “Yeah, drowning for a few weeks, not so much.”

“Well, you’ve already taken your sword back, so that doesn’t tell us anything,” Sam said to Cas.

“No,” Cas said slowly. His mouth twisted very slightly, and then he set his sword down upon the table. “You still have the other sword I left with you?”

“Yeah.” Sam dug around in his duffle and handed it out. Castiel took it with an unhappy expression, but slipped it up his sleeve without hesitation. And then his wings were hunching up again, tightening around his narrow shoulders. “I think I need to check on some things.”

The wings drew back.

Dean reached forward reflexively, “Woah, wait, Cas, you’re not even—”

His hands closed on air.

“—healed up. Shit.”

“Where the fuck is he going?” Sam asked.

Dean sighed. “Who knows, dude. But if he ends up in the ocean or some shit, we are going to have some strong words when he comes back.”

The sword that Castiel had left, _Cas’s_ sword, glinted on the table.

***

The advantages of brightness and sharpness were that they’re the tools of swiftness, accuracy, and clean death.

The miles to the border of Nevada were as negligible as desert dust.


	2. Chapter 2

Castiel, it seemed, was not so inconsiderate as to leave Dean a shivering mess this time around, which Dean interpreted as an indicator only that whatever answer the angel was seeking wasn’t anywhere particularly hostile or otherwise uncomfortable to reside in.

It still didn’t give him any answers, so the best they could do was keep moving on.

“Bobby just called,” he said when Sam was coming back from the library. “We’ve got a rift in northern Texas, spewing demonic activity right and left.”

“We still have no idea how to actually close the things,” Sam pointed out.

“Yep. But we can strongly discourage the sons of bitches from their comings and goings.”

They drove east, Dean revelling in his non-invalided state, and ignoring the creeping worry that Cas was off doing something monumentally stupid.

***

The rift made itself known before they even got to Texas. Along the border of New Mexico were a string of burnt-out towns populated by survivors who looked at the Winchesters with hollow eyes and didn’t bother to hide the blood on their hands.

They stopped in each and tried their best to help out, but there wasn’t a lot they could do—whatever demons had gotten out hadn’t stuck around after acquiring their meat suits, and none of it was going to stop until they reached the epicentre and tried to block it off.

Not that they knew how to do that.

Yet.

“Jesus,” Dean said under his breath, after they pulled out of the first town that had gotten hit. “This is getting worse.”

“Way worse,” Sam agreed.

They drove through three more hollow towns before the rift made itself known, and then it was there, gaping wide like a python’s unhinged jaw, fangs and all with its ragged edges and blackened inner walls. 

They spent a second just staring at the wrongness of it, before Sam blinked hard, and said, “Dean, I think we’ve been here before.”

“What? How can you...oh, shit.”

Northern Texas. Where Sam had picked up that hot little bartender. And yeah, there--Dean could see the bar just across the street from the rift, a black husk that looked like a strong breeze would turn it to ash. 

There was a sound of crunching metal some yards away. In the distance, a lone figure appeared, walking swiftly.

Then, it wasn’t alone.

“Call Cas,” Sam said.

The phone was already in his hand. “Calling.”

And finally, Cas picked up on the second ring. “Dean. I’m glad you called.”

“Yeah? Well, whatever you were gonna tell us has gotta wait, because we’re gonna need help over here real fast.”

“As it happens—” A flutter of wings (and a flare of brightness that Dean winced at) indicated Cas’s arrival in the back seat of the Impala, “I believe the reason I’m glad for your call is the same as your need for me here.”

Sam raised an eyebrow. “Explain?”

Castiel looked darkly out at the molten maw of the rift. His wings arched forward towards the front seat. “I have deduced what has been causing these. You won’t like it.”

“That depends,” Dean said. “You got a way of closing them?”

“Yes. Theoretically.”

“Well, that’s a start. Hit me.” 

Castiel frowned, visibly translating what Dean had said into what he meant, and then nodded. “The rips in time and space are my fault,” he said, “Because they are caused by Raphael’s pursuit.”

“Raphael is ripping holes in reality to find you?” Sam exclaimed. “Aren’t there easier ways...?”

“I have made it...extremely difficult. So, no.” 

“Awesome,” Dean said snidely, “Now how about that solution? Because seriously, demons. Right there.” He jabbed a finger at the figures that were growing steadily closer. 

“Those have already materialised, we have to kill them the usual way. Fortunately, I am still capable of that,” Castiel replied. 

“One step at a time, then,” Dean said, and grabbed his rifle from the back seat. The figures were no longer that--he could see their faces, now. “Let’s go.”

***

Cas proved way more than capable. Dean hadn’t seen him fight since he’d borrowed his sword, and if anything, the angel had gotten even faster. Resurrection followed by a series of boss fights with angelic higher-ups, Dean figured, could really put a guy on form. 

He and Sam were armed to the teeth, and with the demons coming to them, the Impala became their armoury and cover all at once.

Shit, Dean was going to have to put some serious work into her when this was all over. His poor baby.

Castiel didn’t bother with cover, though, just waded into the mob with light erupting from his hands and burning through corrupted flesh like a man-sized barbecue. He seemed recovered, too, because his wings were no longer blackened and ragged; instead, he moved them like fiery scythes, in line with his borrowed sword, cutting through demons that collapsed in his wake like their strings had been cut.

Dean and Sam alternated between exorcisms, the Colt, and Ruby’s knife, as well as a hell of a lot of salt rounds. Dean kept hold of Cas’s sword too, figuring it couldn’t hurt.

By the time they were done, three of the Impala’s windows were shattered, the hood scratched to hell and dented, and one of the tires was out for the count. And that was just the car.

“Fuck, man, I think my ankle’s broken,” Dean said. He tried to get up and failed. “Yep, definitely broken.” He propped himself up with the sword, and used it to hoist himself forward. “You okay?” he jerked his chin at Sam, looking at the slight hunch in his shoulders.

“Cracked ribs, maybe?” Sam offered. “It’s probably fine.”

Castiel wiped his blade on his trench coat and put a hand on Dean’s shoulder. “Don’t move. I can fix this,” he said.

“You filled with God’s healing powers or something now?” Dean said dryly.

“Or something,” Castiel replied, just as dry, and put his hand on Dean’s ankle over his dirty sock. Warmth wormed its way down through his muscles down to the bone, and he could feel it all righting itself. He sucked in a breath.

“Okay then. Um. Thanks,” he said, after a moment. He flexed his foot. It responded easily, a couple of popping sounds the only evidence that it had been anything less than fine. “Sweet,” he said, “Give me a hand up.”

Castiel paused, translated, and then straightened with one hand extended for Dean to haul himself up on. 

Dean slapped his hand into Cas’s grip, propping himself up with the sword again. 

And without any warning, yelped and fell back on his ass, Castiel’s hand going lax in surprise. 

The sword skittered across the asphalt.

There was a beat, in which all three of them stared at it. 

“Did that just...go on fire for a second?” Sam said finally. 

“Oh good, I wasn’t the only one who saw that,” Dean said. 

“This complicates things,” Castiel growled. Then he shot a glance at the carnage around them. “Also, we need to move.”

Dean gestured at the Impala. “You fix her, and we can go.”

Sam shot him a look even as Castiel went to lay hands on the car. “You’re…letting him mojo the car?”

Dean stared at him. “…Yes?”

Sam huffed, and put his hands up in surrender. He walked around to the other side of the now-pristine Impala, muttering under his breath something like _’so far gone, I can’t even’_ that Dean couldn’t entirely catch.

“What now?” he said, as he got behind the wheel, Cas settled in behind him. 

“I’m so not talking to you right now,” Sam said flatly.

Dean shrugged, and kicked the car into gear.

***

They drove in lurching silence for about three miles on the Impala’s spare tire before Dean finally said, “So, we gonna talk about this?”

“I, for one, would definitely like to talk about this,” Sam said.

“What do you want to know?” Castiel answered.

“Try everything, dude,” Dean snapped. “You said these freaking hellmouths are because of Raphael chasing after you, and you didn’t tell us until now? What gives?”

“I didn’t know,” Castiel said, looking away. “When you first told me about them, I thought it was Hell’s doing, and I did my best, when I had _time_ ,” he added acidly, “To investigate that suspicion. I was wrong. In my defence, I was rather occupied with enforcing order in Heaven while avoiding detection by its more disagreeable factions. I didn’t realise the two issues were connected until today.”

“And what was so special about today?” Sam asked.

“This particular hole. It is large, and completely out of proportion with what Hell is capable of creating right now. I can only conclude that they have had outside help. I hadn’t wanted to believe that Raphael should wish to stoop so far as to consort with demons, but apparently he is truly bound and determined to find me.” Cas cocked his head, looking contemplative. “On the other hand, once this comes to light I should think many of Raphael’s supporters will wish to change their allegiances.”

“Oh, well that’s good,” Dean said flatly. “So who is he collaborating with?”

“I suspect Asrophel. He was one of the most powerful seraphim, and when he fell in the first war, he fell very low indeed. If anyone could rip through Heaven and Hell, it would be him.”

“Awesome. So we kill him, prove that Raphael was helping him out, and then shut down the hellmouths. Wait, how do we shut down the hellmouths?”

“ _We_ can’t. But it is helpful, really, that Raphael was the one to aid their opening, because it means that angelic force can close them.”

“So we can’t, but you can?”

“Theoretically, yes.” Castiel looked away, and then muttered something else that Dean couldn’t understand.

“Wait,” Sam stopped, wiping a bloody hand across his forehead to push his hair out of the way, only to leave a red smear it its place. “You said that Raphael was following you. And we’ve been trying to clean up after him, so we’ve been pretty much following you around, albeit a few weeks behind. So how did he end up in Texas? We went there before you ever did.”

Castiel sighed and looked at Dean. “It’s complicated,” he said. “And irrelevant.”

“Seriously?” Dean swung around to face him. “That’s the card you’re playing here?”

Castiel glowered. “Yes.”

“Fine. Whatever.” He threw up his hands. “Just tell us how to fix this goddamn situation.”

“We need to go to consecrated ground. It will give us an advantage against Asrophel, though admittedly not much of one. And then we will need supplies.”

“Nearest consecrated ground is northwest of here, Oklahoma,” Sam said, “It’ll take a few hours.”

“Drive fast,” Castiel advised, and then fell silent.

Dean made a frustrated noise in his throat, and pressed down on the accelerator.

***

They made it to the abandoned church on the outskirts of Bumfuck-Nowhere, Oklahoma and Castiel immediately set to work inscribing sigils of protection and drawing the borders of their battleground.

“You really think Asfodel or whatever is gonna just—”

“Asrophel. And he has been sufficiently motivated, so yes.”

“Okay,” Dean said, and let him get to it. 

Sam was off at the local store getting the supplies Cas had requested, and so Dean was left sitting on the hood of the Impala, feeling pretty ignorant about the stuff Cas was laying down, considering it was all Enochian and therefore pretty much unintelligible to him. Sam had tried reading up on the language a while back, when angels first came on the scene, and while he’d managed to put together the alphabet, the language itself, let alone the way in which the angels used it (which was a whole ‘nother unwritten kettle of fish) remained mostly a frustrating mystery to him. 

Dean had a memory of Cas, in one of their darker moments, teaching him those few basic, important sigils of banishment, of distress, and finally, of calling. Cas had done it in pen on a diner napkin, hesitating before pressing ink to paper. “If you truly need me,” he said, “If your life is in danger, use it.”

He’d watched and corrected until Dean had the strokes and swoops of them memorised, and could put each of them, especially the last, down in the space of a desperate heartbeat. 

Dean had later considered telling Sam about it. But then he’d thought about how Castiel had picked a moment specifically when Sam had stayed back at the motel to tell him, and kept his mouth shut. He justified it by thinking that this was still when Lucifer was on the prowl for Sam’s meat suit. 

But then the apocalypse came and went, and he still hadn’t said a word.

He tried not to think about it, these days.

“How long is it going to take for Asrophel to get here?” he asked.

“Not long,” Castiel said unhelpfully.

“Cas,” Dean said, after a long second, “What the fuck’s up with your sword?”

“I don’t want to talk about it.”

Dean could feel his jaw lock up with frustration. He made an inarticulate noise deep in his throat. “Well, fuck you,” he managed. “This isn’t just about you now, it’s about me too apparently, and I want to know.”

“I can’t—” Castiel cut himself off like he was angry, but not angry with Dean, not like usual, but rather like he was angry at the world, and _that_ never ended well. “It’s too uncertain at this point. I don’t…I don’t know what to tell you.”

“You could tell me what you’re thinking,” Dean offered, “I’ll take what I can get.”

Castiel must finally recognise just how strung out Dean’s gotten, because his lips compress and tip down at the corners. “I have only the barest of suspicions, and none of them bear explanation at this point,” he said finally. “We’ve once again wandered into unknown territory, and I think that at this point the only thing we need to know about it is how it works, not why.”

“And how it works, is…?” Dean started, and then he looked back down at the sword. Castiel came up to him, and laid one hand lightly on his wrist.

Dean sucked in a breath, and lifted the sword. Fire followed in neat, dangerous whorls. “That’s...pretty fucking boss,” Dean said after a second. He tried very hard not to think about Castiel’s grip, more firm and warming than the flames curling around the sword between them.

“May I finish this now?” Cas said, with an edge of his previous irritation.

“Okay,” Dean agrees readily, because that’s more than he expected, honestly. Cas was a stubborn sonuvabitch, after all. “Go ahead, princess,” and he waved him off. 

Cas turned away, and Dean propped the other spare sword up over his knees. The metal felt warm and unnaturally smooth, but that was normal—for as long as he could remember having it in his possession, it had always felt a bit like mercury in his grip. It had taken some getting used to, making sure that he didn’t hold it like an amateur; a blade of any kind required a loose, finessed grip to allow for maximum effectiveness and flexibility. Angel swords always felt like they were on the verge of slipping out from between your fingers. By this time, though, Dean felt like he’d gotten more than enough practice that, even though he didn’t have Cas’s supernatural strength and agility, he could still handle the thing without looking like an idiot.

He traced the contours of the hand guard with his thumb. Nothing special happened. 

Sam came back with a plastic bag full of supplies in one hand and a gallon of gasoline in the other. “I got everything except the iron filings,” he said. “Think steel wool will work?”

“It should suffice,” Castiel said, gesturing for Sam to bring it over. “Right now we have a working boundary, but one that could be breached with sufficient power, and Raphael has more than enough to do so. We’ll need to do the remainder of the work inside.”

“You need my help?” Dean asked.

Castiel looked at him. “Watch for them.”

Dean nodded, and hopped off the car, following Sam and Cas until they reached the main arch of the church. The day was sunny—hardly portentous at all, except for how there’d been a deep, churning dread in Dean’s stomach ever since Cas appeared in the back seat. 

He plonked himself down on the steps of the church and scanned the horizon. Behind him he could hear Cas’s curt instructions and the steady noises of Sam laying down salt and making patterns on the altar in clumps of steel wool.

It was calming, in a way. 

He almost believed that he imagined the tremor. 

It started like a low, intermittent hum. The deep resonance of a detuned electric guitar put through a massive subwoofer.

Dean straightened, and put a hand down flat against the ground.

The dirt shivered.

“Guys,” he said, looking around and seeing nothing. “Did you feel that?”

“Definitely felt that,” Sam confirmed. “We’re not ready.”

“Too bad,” Dean said, swallowing. “I think he’s here.”

There was a crack in the world. A sliver of darkness in the air that widened with a grating, awful tremble. It spidered outwards in all directions, and then it reached the border of the church grounds, and _pounded._

Gold light flaked off the invisible barrier.

 _THOOM_. 

The crack in the world pressed, further and further until Dean could feel his ears pop with the change in atmospheric pressure. He could hear Sam curse inside the building, Castiel muttering urgently. Pieces of siding shuddered and fell from the walls of the church, bouncing on the dirt in splinters.

There was movement in the void beyond the opening. 

And maybe it was the thickness of the air, maybe it was adrenaline getting the best of him, or maybe it was just the fact that Dean felt like he’d been strung along by this bullshit for too long, but either way, he just couldn’t stand to wait any longer.

 _Fuck this_ , he thought. Walking forward, he twirled the sword once in his hand and then stabbed it forward into the breach.

He dimly heard Castiel shouting at him. Oops. 

A hand wrapped around his wrist, even as an unholy shriek battered his eardrums. And automatically, adrenaline shooting through him, Dean yanked back.

Something—some _one_ —tumbled through the opening, and its nails raked searing furrows across Dean’s abdomen as they fell. 

“Dean!” Sam shouted from somewhere, footsteps pounding; Dean hit the ground hard, he could tell that much, and on auto-pilot he rolled with the impact, getting up onto his hands and knees just in time to receive a kick to the chest that sent him sprawling again, the imprint of a blunt-soled boot knocking the wind from his lungs.

There was something bright and sharp streaking across his vision.

The footsteps halt abruptly, out of his line of sight. 

“My dear brother, I’m afraid you’re in deep shit,” someone said, and the voice is familiar and not at the same time—a familiar angel, in unfamiliar skin.

“Hello, Raphael,” Dean heard Castiel say, utterly without inflection.

There was a clang of swords, and then a rough impact on the dirt, the sound of cracking and repairing bone. The repairing was slow, though—that much Dean could tell from the almost inaudible wheeze that made its way past Castiel’s lips.

Dean tried to get up again, and was unceremoniously pounded back into the earth, that same godforsaken boot between his shoulder blades.

“Tch, tch,” said a second voice above him, a tinny, snarling voice that sounded like it came from somewhere dark and cold. “Don’t make it worse for yourself, insect.”

“Asrophel, I take it?” Sam said, as solidly as he could. Dean couldn’t tell from where he was, but he guessed his brother was not exactly in a tactically sound position.

“The very same,” the tinny voice replied, and then added, with heavy irony, “Now shut up while justice is meted out.”

“Justice?” Dean muttered, and is rewarded by another healthy stomp accompanied by the unpleasant sound of one of his ribs snapping. He tried to suppress a groan and couldn’t. 

Somewhere behind him, Sam hissed in sympathy and rage.

“Funny how your advantage has now become your downfall, Castiel,” Raphael mused. “Had you kept yourself whole, you might have stood a chance against us. Temporarily,” he amended.

Castiel twitched on the ground. “Then I have actually…?” he began, and then half-silenced himself, half-broke off with a wet, hacking cough that spattered blood on the ground.

Raphael cocked his head. “You didn’t even know? Your lowliness continues to astonish. Just as well you never lasted as Heaven’s _sheriff_ ,” he said in distaste. “As if any but an archangel was truly righteous enough to lead us.”

“And so you choose to bring a demon into the fold instead?” Castiel rasped.

“I am no _demon_ ,” Asrophel spat. “I am the Fallen.”

“Funny,” Cas said, “I always thought the two terms were interchangeable.”

Before Raphael could reply, he dove for his sword. 

He was too slow. 

Raphael’s boot came down directly on Castiel’s wing. 

Dean had seen a lot of horrible things in his life (and in his death…he’s not going there), but it was hard for him to think in that moment of something worse than the way a whole spread of Cas’s wing just suddenly snapped and went utterly dark, flames dying like they’d been doused with a bucket of water.. 

Castiel didn’t scream. But his face twisted up, and this small, awful noise forced its way out through his throat. 

Dean felt himself slowly slipping down the path of not thinking rationally about this shit.

He squirmed as best he could under Asrophel’s boot, ignoring both the demon’s snarl and the protest of his ribs, and spotted the sword, several feet away, near his feet. Sam was standing close by, but it was very clear why he hadn’t made any moves yet—Asrophel had a hand outstretched towards him, as threatening as any gun. 

There were no viable options.

Castiel made a strangled noise as Raphael ground his heel down with obvious enjoyment. The fire of his wings sputtered.

Fire. 

Dean bared his teeth, tasting blood and dirt. 

He could just reach the front pocket of his jeans. Retrieve the zippo and flick it open. 

Toss it the bare ten inches to the line of salt and gasoline just in front of the tear in the world before heaving himself back and into a ball with all of his strength. 

_Phwoom_.

He could feel the scorch singe his hair and the sleeves of his flannel, but that was unimportant in comparison to the sudden cries of surprise and the weight lifted from his back. Not giving himself any time to think, he slammed himself to his feet, grabbing a wad of what felt like jacket and an arm beneath that, and throwing with all of his strength towards the flames. “Sam!” he shouted. “Little help!”

“No!” Raphael yelled, moving towards them, but as soon as he took his foot off Castiel’s wing, Cas was going for him, clinging like a limpet, slowing him just enough to give Sam a chance to dart forward and grab Asrophel’s other arm so that together he and Dean could haul him bodily onto the wall of fire that was erupting in an ever rising ring around the church. 

“It’s not enough, he won’t stay,” Dean said, but Sam was already on the move, grabbing up a long, splintered piece of siding from around the church.

“Not a vampire, but,” Sam said, and drove it straight down, spearlike, through the demon’s belly.

Asrophel screamed, clawing at the wound and smoking.

“Exorcism, now,” Dean said, and Sam nodded grimly.

“Dean,” Castiel called.

Dean ran to him, scooping the sword up from the ground.

Raphael had not reacted well to their retaliation. There was a thin line of blood running from his nose, but beyond that he looked untouched. Meanwhile, Cas was on the ground again, expressionless, but only because his face was beginning to swell beneath the blood streaks. One arm was at an unnatural angle, and his wings were ragged and dim, huge swathes of feathers reduced to sooty black.

“Yeah, okay. This ends now,” Dean said. 

“I will bring Heaven back to its former glory if it is the last thing I do,” Raphael sneered. “You think you can stop me?”

Dean stepped forward slowly, hands at his sides, nothing to see here. The only thing they’ve got going for them is the element of surprise at this point, and even that’s tenuous. But still, Dean knew a con when he saw one.

He just needs to get close enough. 

“You know, I wish your fellow featherbrains could see you right now,” he said, conversationally. “Oh, how the might have fallen, and all that jazz.”

Raphael narrowed his eyes. Dean looked down and met Castiel’s one still-open eye, willing him to understand, and after a bare few seconds, caught his minute nod of understanding. 

Castiel tipped his head back down to the ground, where his fingers rested on the dirt, smeared with red.

“I mean seriously, getting one of the fallen to help your cause? Isn’t that, like, indicator number one that need to take a step back, look at your life, look at your choices?” Dean went on, lifting his shoulders and eyebrows in the universal sign of _just sayin’_. “Cause I mean, there’s a reason why they’re damned, right? They’re clearly not operating on the right side of the law, here. Otherwise, they wouldn’t be able to get ganked the way Sammy here’s getting away with it, yeah?”

Raphael made an inarticulate noise of rage as Sam saluted from behind Dean, Asrophel’s body coughing up acrid pools of smoke from his mouth and the gaping hole in his chest.

Dean shot another look down at Cas while the archangel was distracted. Three symbols in the dirt. It would have to be enough.

“So I gotta ask,” he said, drawing Raphael’s attention again. “Why a demon? Surely if what Cas is doing is so very wrong, surely you’ve got some angels hanging around just gagging to get rid of him. Why Asrophel? Why _this world_?”

“Because this world is _broken!_ ” Raphael roared. “It is past its expiration date. You think you’re supposed to be here, after Father’s plan was so injuriously thwarted? You think you primates and all of your sad creations were meant to last for more than a breath of this universe’s lifespan? You are _nothing_. We were promised Paradise. And so long as Castiel was ruling Heaven and loving this speck of dust upon the eye of the cosmos, we were denied _everything_. So I consort with whoever knows the true path, whoever will follow me, and I will tear apart you, and your world, and your muddied angel until nothing is left but dust unto dust.”

Dean set his jaw. And stalwartly ignored the sudden presence of three figures behind Raphael, stock-still and fiery beyond the wall of flames, their gazes locked upon him.

“Well,” he said finally, “That explains a lot, I guess. So, uh, thanks for that. I guess now I owe you an answer, too.”

He took another step forward, now only a yard from Raphael, whose nostrils flared. Castiel was directly at both of their feet now. 

“You asked me,” Dean said slowly, “If I thought I could stop you. And the answer is, no. No, I don’t think I can.”

 _We don’t have to understand why, just how it works,_ he thought. And then he felt the slickness of a blood-soaked hand close around the bare skin of his ankle. It felt like the closing of a circuit. 

The sword obediently flared to life. 

Raphael’s eyes went wide.

Dean smiled. He had a line, and goddamn was he gonna get to say it. 

“I think _we_ can, though.”

He drives the sword in through the tender underside of the archangel’s jaw and then up, the fire like a lightening strike, cauterising the entrance as it slipped through, cutting apart bone and brain matter like it was tapioca pudding. 

Raphael screamed.

His light burst upwards and outwards and died fighting. When his host body fell to the ground, the ashes of his wings were those of attempted flight, of severed violence. 

Dean exhaled shakily. “Well,” he said, locking his knees so he didn’t crumple to the ground. “That was fun.”

Sam came up behind him and patted his shoulder. “Nice play, there.”

Castiel managed to pull himself up to his knees; Dean helped him with the rest, and then decided without thinking about it too hard to keep him close. He jerked his chin at the three angels outside the circle of fire. “Who’d you call?”

“One friend,” Cas answered, voice still wet with blood and scratchy with dirt, “And two who I hope to call friends very soon.”

“Will you let us through, brother?” one of them said, coming closer. She was wearing the body of an Asian woman, mid-thirties, swathed in a woolly sweater and a pair of slim, well-worn jeans with ballet flats. The other two appeared younger, one looking like he came from a Young Republicans convention, all business pinstripes and argyle, the other short and dark in black sweatpants and hoodie. Of the three, only the Young Republican didn’t look shaken down to his marrow.

Sam looked at Castiel, who shrugged in acquiescence, and then went and fetched the last of the rock salt, which he poured over a section of the fire, effectively smothering it. The three angels picked their way across with looks of discomfort.

Young Republican came forward first and clasped Castiel’s hand in his own. “You should have told me it had gotten this bad,” he said quietly.

Castiel straightened, and abruptly his most obvious wounds were gone, the blood mopped away. His wings still sputtered and hung crookedly, though. “Thank you, Sandalphon,” he said gravely, “But would you have believed me?”

Sandalphon winced. “Perhaps,” he said. “Though perhaps not if you had come to me alone. Knowing you are whole, one way or another,” he shot a glance at Dean, “Helps a great deal.”

Dean gave him the side eye. “And you guys?” he said, gesturing vaguely at the two other angels. “You got anything to say?”

“You have murdered an archangel,” the shorter one growled. 

“An archangel that consorted with demons,” the Asian woman corrected. “Which by our laws would have resulted in the same fate.” 

“Dean, these are Harut and Tzaphqiel,” Castiel said, indicating first the woman, then the man. “Tzaphqiel is an archangel.”

“And as such favours his oldest brethren,” Harut said. Tzaphqiel glared at her, but didn’t disagree.

Sam, being Sam, smartly opted for diplomacy. “I’m sorry for your loss,” he said, “But I don’t think there was any other call we could have made.”

“No,” Harut agreed. She looked with distaste at the gaping tear that still breathed sour, hot air out at them. “It is often difficult,” she said slowly, “To know what the right path for us is, now. But I find that, when in doubt, humility should always take us to task first.”

“I think we can safely say that Raphael has lacked humility for centuries,” Sandalphon said dryly. He gave the tear a dark look. “Although I would not have expected him to go to such lengths as this.”

“They used to be close,” Tzaphqiel said. At Sam’s puzzled look, he added, “Raphael, and Asrophel. Before the war.”

“We all made our choices,” Harut said. “But perhaps the time has come to begin to make amends.” She came up to stand beside Sandalphon, and looked Castiel up and down. 

“Normally I would say that you’ve committed treason against God,” she said conversationally, and Dean bristled. She glanced over, and tilted a smile at him. “But then, it seems that we should perhaps be looking more closely at the Word before passing judgement these days.”

Castiel looked distinctly uncomfortable. “Should things perhaps be put back as they were?” he asked, shifting. 

“That’s up to him,” Sandalphon said, jerking his head at Dean. “Or have you not noticed how well he’s holding on to it?”

Dean frowned. “What the hell are you people talking about?”

All of them ignored him, of course. Sandalphon and Castiel were looking intensely at each other, apparently having a conversation all by themselves, which just served to irritate Dean more. 

Castiel was looking more and more uncomfortable and wondering by the minute. Then Harut smiled a bit more widely, and Castiel stilled.

Dean cleared his throat. Loudly.

Sandalphon broke off and looked at him, one eyebrow raised.

“We’ll let you two discuss it now,” Harut cut in. She looked again at the tear. “We must set about righting this, first. Tzaphqiel! Aid us, if you please.”

The two angels walked away towards the tear, Tzaphqiel falling into place beside them, leaving Dean, Sam, and Castiel standing awkwardly next to the slowly dying flames of the protective circle. 

Castiel took a breath. He looked shell-shocked. “Sam, could you—“

“Oh, I am _so_ out of here,” Sam said, putting his hands up. “Stuff to clean up in the church, and the Impala, and hey, maybe I’ll grab some lunch? Yeah, you know what, I’m starving, I’m grabbing lunch.”

“Bring back pie!” Dean shouted after him. 

Sam waved a hand in acknowledgement, not bothering to turn around.

And then there were two. 

Dean crossed his arms, and then was abruptly reminded that his ribs were broken. He flinched, and settled for hands in his pockets. “So,” he grunted. 

“So,” Cas echoed. Dean really should stop teaching him the human ways of being awkward—he was already an awkward angel, there was nothing good about him layering that shit.

“What’d Sandy have to say for himself?” Dean asked. 

Castiel took a breath. “ _Sandalphon_ explained…what precisely my actions have precipitated. Here, and in Heaven.”

“And?” 

“Raphael, as you know, has been ripping the worlds of Heaven, Hell and Earth searching for me. These fissures, these hellmouths, as you call them—”

“As Buffy calls them,” Dean corrected.

“I don’t know who that is,” Cas dismissed, “They should have succeeded. Every one of them should have opened directly where I was, I should be dead several times over now.”

That was…not a comforting thought. Dean tried to ignore it. “So why aren’t you?” he asked.

Castiel looked away. 

“You won’t like this,” he said.

Dean narrowed his eyes. “Is this...?” he started slowly, stopped, and then started again, “Is this about the sword borrowing again?”

“It is,” Castiel agreed. He looked acutely uncomfortable, and annoyed about it. “Angels can find other angels through their grace,” he said finally, seemingly out of nowhere.

“Holy tracking signals,” Dean said, deciding to play along. “Fair enough.” He’d seen enough of angels being able to pop up wherever they pleased to find the notion feasible. 

“It seems that my signal, as you say, was...split,” Castiel said delicately. “I didn’t mean for it to be, but it has been in one way advantageous, in that had it not been, Raphael would certainly have found me far sooner. When I gave you my sword, it...confused the signals. I went one way, you went another, and Raphael was unable to tell which one was truly me.”

It had begun to prickle in Dean’s mind, before the shit really hit the fan, that something like this had happened, but hearing it from Cas made it all kinds of…strange. Uncomfortable? Dean couldn’t tell. 

“I split myself,” Castiel said, like he couldn’t quite believe it himself. “And I entrusted you with half of me.”

Dean blinked. Well, when you put it like that. 

He opened his mouth to say something. Thought better and closed it. And then tried again.

“Wh…why’d you think I wouldn’t like that? Or, I mean, that I’d be bothered,” he corrected quickly. 

“It was without your consent,” Castiel said, looking away again, voice dropping away. “I know how you felt about Michael.”

Dean squinted at him. “You’re not Michael, dude. Anything but. And besides, this is totally different, you’re not exactly riding around in my body like a puppet master, right?” He paused. “…Right?”

“I’m not controlling you,” Cas assured, but now his eyes had strayed to somewhere around Dean’s sternum. Dean put his hand there on instinct.

“But when you said that things should be put back,” he said slowly, “You meant…you?”

Castiel finally looked up to meet his eyes, and Dean just kind of, _got it_. He thought back to Sandalphon’s odd, puzzled smile and raised eyebrow.

Goddamn it, he was apparently harbouring Castiel like a spiritual fugitive or some shit. And Cas… _trusted_ him to, one way or another.

What distance they might have kept after everything with Lucifer had been done suddenly seemed pretty damn irrelevant. Particularly when…

“I’ve been, uh, hanging on kind of tightly, I take it?” Dean offered.

“I’m sure it was not intentional,” Castiel muttered, his wings pulling tight around him. Dean had to forcibly stop himself from reaching out and soothing them, clearing away the ash so that the fire can come up blazing again.

He wondered if maybe he didn’t need to stop himself.

God, they both suck at this. 

There came a whoosh of hot air that buffeted the both of them to one side, and Castiel steadied Dean with hand on his elbow.

Tzaphqiel approached them, his hands shoved in the pockets of his hoodie. “This rupture has been sealed,” he said, “But there are many others. You’ve been busy,” he observed, a bit snidely.

Dean bristled, but Castiel merely said, “Our brother was persistent.”

“Hm.” Tzaphqiel shrugged. “We will need help. I would like to arrange a task force.”

“You’re consulting me?” Castiel asked, the slight shift of his head the only indication of his surprise.

The archangel just looked at him levelly. “Your rank has not changed since Raphael’s campaign against you.”

“I see. Well, choose who you think best. The quicker we can be away from here, the better.”

Tzaphqiel nodded in agreement, and stepped away. Harut and Sandalphon were waiting for him a ways away. Sandalphon raised a hand in farewell. 

“We will see you soon, Castiel,” he called. And then he smirked. “But maybe not very soon.”

“Wait, what about—?” Castiel started, alarmed.

“You called yourself Team Free Will, did you not?” Harut said. “So exercise your will, brother. We won’t stop you.”

And then they disappeared.

“Still jerks,” Dean said, after a beat. “Jerks with wings.”

Castiel didn’t disagree.

Dean paused again. Something in his brain stuttered to a halt, and then seemed to come back online brighter and warmer than before. “Jerks with wings,” he repeated, “That I _can’t see_.”

Castiel frowned at him. “Pardon?”

“I couldn’t see their wings,” Dean said, blinking. “And I can still see yours.”

“Dean—“

“It’s personal,” he continued, shaking his head, exhaling. “It’s so fucking personal, Cas, it’s fucking ridiculous.”

Because in the end, it wasn’t so much the physical effects so much as the _choice_ —consciously or not, Castiel had trusted Dean with his faith, his physical manifestation of his faith, and that was the kind of thing that you couldn’t doubt, not in the way you could doubt the amorphous constancy of Castiel’s continued presence in his life, or the way he fought for Dean even when Dean was being an idiot. And Dean knew, deep down, that all of those things should have been enough, been way fucking more than enough, because Christ—

But he had trust issues, and he knew it. This just tore them all to shreds by being so glaring and powerful that it almost seared his eyes. Should have, by all accounts.

So yeah, if something like that hit him with a clue-by-four, he was actually capable of manning up.

His feelings about Cas had warped into a desperate sort of care anyway; a care that he couldn’t ignore.

“Cas,” he said, choking slightly, “Do you…”

Castiel peered at him for a long second, searching him, and then he looked positively gobsmacked. “Yes,” he breathed. “I hadn’t thought, but—“

“C’mere.”

And Dean reeled him in, ignoring the protests of his ribs, the crackle of his spine and his bad knee, because none of that stood up to Cas, the inside of his mouth still coppery with blood, his hands too warm against his waist, and his wings, black and sputtering, but getting brighter by the second, wrapping around them both.

Brighter and brighter…

Dean felt the smallest of tugs, somewhere around his sternum, like his diaphragm stretching. He nipped at Cas’s bottom lip and pulled away just enough murmur, “I think I have something of yours.”

“I really don’t care at this point,” Cas replied, which was gratifying, but no.

“You need it more than I do,” Dean said, “Borrowing it was enough.”

Cas looked at him, uncompromising as always, and after a moment, nodded. And then his hand was at the back of Dean’s neck, pulling him back in.

The tug became something more, something wider and easier. Dean just opened up and let it happen, and a glow started past his closed eyelids, intensifying until he couldn’t help but open his eyes to look. 

He caught the briefest glimpse of whiteness, and the double-exposure of Cas in his arms, and Cas all around him, a flaming sword and fulsome albatross wings, before everything shifted, and then there was nothing.

Just Cas, dark-haired and tired-looking, plastered to his front. 

No fire at all, anywhere.

Dean decided that that was really more than enough for him, thanks. He leaned further in, thumbs tracing the bumps of Cas’s spine underneath the trench coat, before easing away.

“All fixed?” he said.

“In more ways than one, really,” Castiel remarked. He looked slightly dazed, but his eyes were bright.

Dean snorted.

There was a crunching of gravel marking Sam and the Impala’s return. “Do you know how far away I had to go for a proper diner?” he bitched out the window. “You guys might as well hop in, and we’ll just get the hell out of this town altogether.”

Dean nodded. “Sounds good to me. Cas?”

Castiel tilted his head. “All right.” 

It was only when they started towards the car that Dean realised that Cas hadn’t let go of his arm. He tentatively decided not to mind.

***

The diner was surprisingly decent, though maybe that was just the post-second-apocalypse-aversion adrenaline talking. Dean acquired the requisite burger and fries and then banoffee pie, which, what the hell?

“It’s British,” Sam said, the know-it-all.

“Then why the fuck is it in the middle of Oklahoma?”

“Owner’s mom was Scottish,” the waitress said, with a smile. “Will that be all?”

“Thanks, no,” Dean smiled.

The pie was pretty damn good.

It didn’t distract him, though, from the intent look Cas was giving him, like he was trying to figure something out.

Yeah.

“So the angels are actually going to clean up the mess this time?” Sam asked, with a faint but not inappropriate air of disbelief.

“They are,” Castiel, confirmed. “We can trust Sandalphon to report if Tzaphqiel steps out of line.”

“And Harut? She seemed…sensible,” Sam said.

“Harut is most worldly, even in comparison to other angels,” Castiel replied. “She can be trusted.”

“So we’re off the hook?” Dean asked.

“Other than the remaining demons that have already been let loose upon the earth,” Castiel said dryly. “Yes.”

“Honestly,” Sam said, wrinkling his nose, “That sounds better than usual.”

Dean nodded. “So,” he said, “You think you can stick around for a bit, Cas?”

Castiel gave him a watchful look. “It does seem like I have some time at my disposal, yes.”

“Good.”

Sam made a strangled noise, and called out, “Check please!” to the waitress.

Dean just looked at Castiel, and smiled.

 

_Fin._


End file.
